“I can tell you, if we have a case where there really is overwhelming evidence, that a player committed a violation of the program, our fight is going to be that they make a deal,” Weiner said without referring to specific players. “We’re not interested in having players with overwhelming evidence that they violated the (drug) program out there. Most of the players aren’t interested in that. We’d like to have a clean program.”

One should assume that Weiner and the MLBPA will fight cases with which there are legitimate disputes as to culpability, and one should also assume that they will defend the due process rights of everyone involved, but the days where it’s 100% scorched-Earth between the league and the union are a long way in the rear-view mirror, so it shouldn’t be surprising that Weiner is taking a pragmatic approach here as well.

The interesting question will be if a player falls under Weiner’s “overwhelming evidence” category and still decides to fight. I presume he’d do so with his own legal team. And I presume the union would be issuing lots of awkward statements trying to both distance itself from the defense and respect the process. But that will sure be hard after these statements.